New Product: Tech Serenity Prayer

by Ariela

On days when you need help remembering how to take a deep breath and not take a baseball bat to all the machines in sight, it helps to have this Tech Serenity Prayer at your desk.

How it Came to Be

As with almost all of my art, the inspiration for this piece came from something that happened to me. In my day job I do tech stuff for a non-profit. I describe it as "playing a programmer on TV" - I don't actually do any programming, but I am the admin of a bunch of the applications we use. Recently one crashed and burned in ways that I don't want to relive in the course of this blog post, but it was offline for an unconscionably long time. I've never heard Support use the terms "dangit" and "horrified fascination" in consumer-facing correspondence before.

Some time during this fiasco, I quipped that I needed a serenity prayer for tech problems. Then I realized that there was no reason I couldn't have one, I just needed to figure out if "a hammer" or "rm -rf/" was funnier. After a brief poll of some programmer friends, I decided to go with the latter.

In the tradition of feel-good text, I used a Copperplate hand to write it out, but I put it in white on a blue background to reference the classic Blue Screen of Death. 

Prints are available in two sizes: 8"x10" for $30 and 11"x14" for $45 (matted dimensions).

What is it that I really do?

By Terri

My job title in this business is Manager, specifically Business Manager/Artist Wrangler. My personal business cards read "Knitting Instructor & Artist Wrangler*" But that's an incredibly vague term that conjures up images of Ariela in a Lasso of Truth and doesn't really describe what I do or how I learned how to do it.

I began working at The Judaica House in early 2006. Early on I was tasked with re-inventorying many of the special order items that they carry, such as personalized benchers** (yes, that's pronounced like the thing you sit on followed by the sound you use when you can't find a word), yarmulkes for imprinting and personalized ketubot from various artists (among them, Ariela's former employers). Over several years of employment, I developed relationships with some of the artists we carried and learned a whole lot about how the business works. The personalization form you fill out if you order a ketubah from us? It's a hybrid of the form I used to use at work and the one the Caspis use. My initial proofreading skills came from doing the final check on any ketubah before it went to the customer. And boy did I have to chase down a lot of rabbis. Why? Because before we would send the personalization information to any artist, that information needed to be verified by the wedding officiant.*** That led to me ranting to Ariela during May of 2009:

clearly, it must be wedding season

either that or Rabbi season, because all I seem to be doing is hunting them

Some time later, the following sketch arrived in the mail:

The giant kippah *really* makes this sketch. If you look carefully, you can see where Elmer used to be wearing a black hat.

[Image shows a pencil sketch of Elmer Fudd on the phone, wearing a kippah, holding forms. Text declares "Be vewwy vewwy QUIET. We'we hunting WABBIS...."]

So I amassed a set of incredibly specialized skills over the course of my employment (proofreading, how to get what you want from an artist without making them cranky, dogged persistence in tracking down officiants). I learned what sorts of designs appeal to the standard Jewish consumer vs. the geeky ones. And most importantly, I developed a deep and close friendship with an artist who wanted to start a calligraphy business. 

I stopped working full time at The Judaica House in 2010. By then, Ariela was living in New York City and was steadily taking commissions for ketubot.**** I was her on-tap proofreader for these (I even did one over email), and we began to banter back and forth about Ariela quitting her day job. It was all pipe dreams, even in 2012 when we established that I would be the business manager. It wasn't until 2013 that I actually started doing Business Manager type things (mostly attempting to adjust unreasonable expectations from clients - something I still do). 

But, you insist, none of this answers the question in the blog post title! So what is it that I do?

I proofread texts when possible (not being local to Ariela makes it trickier), answer wholesale inquiries, rein in Ariela's runaway impulses, respond to certain types of client inquiries, come up with product lines, track down phone numbers for licensing departments,***** make sure Ariela meets her deadlines, write many of our product release blog posts, serve as a sounding board, and generally act as the first line of defense for anything that keeps Ariela from being able to Do Art. I smile and nod at calligraphy details, keep our products within scope (and just slightly subversive), act as a font of completely useless knowledge, track down frames at thrift stores, make sure Ariela doesn't take on too much, tweet and share things on Facebook that are relevant to the business, and write long rants on our blog when fandom needs a good swift kick in the pants. Since that doesn't fit on a business card, you get Artist Wrangler instead.

*Unfortunately they went to print before I could get "professional killjoy" added to them

**Small prayerbooks or laminated cards containing the Grace After Meals and other assorted pre and post meal prayers for the Sabbath and Holidays. 

***We ask for your officiant's contact information for this very reason (also, if we have any questions we can avoid asking you them during what is a busy and stressful time for you).

****Our friends did persist in getting married.

*****It's amazing how much easier it is to contact the people in charge of Star Wars licenses now that Disney owns Lucasfilm. 

Hebrew is Stretchy and I Like It: or, Why Ariela Finds Hebrew Easier to Calligraph than English

by Ariela

I have been blathering on Twitter a bunch lately about how much I prefer writing Hebrew (specifically the square Aramaic alphabet, not the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet) to writing in the Latin alphabet. Mostly that has been context-free venting into the void, which is what Twitter is great at, but I thought perhaps I should explain why this is.

First and foremost, Hebrew makes spacing out text much easier by the presence of a number of letters that stretch very easily. Meet every Hebrew-writing calligrapher's best friends, Dalet, Heh, Ḥet, Lamed, Kuf, Reish, and Tav.

Say hello to the nice letters. Letters, say hello to the nice people.

What these letters all have in common is a single line across the top of the letter. That makes it very easy to use them to take up a lot of extra space, like so.

These are the same letters as above, but taking up much more room.
The letters are polite, though. The would never take up this much room on a crowded train.

So if you have a relatively short line of text, but want to take up the full width of the line, just having several of these letters makes that fairly easy.

Same words on both lines, but one is much longer. (Words are delet petucha, 'open door.')

Latin alphabet, by contrast, really only has the characters t and f with these easily extentable horizontal lines, with r and z having not quite horizontal bars. (Z's rarity makes it by far the least useful in this regard.)

The Latin alphabet's poor excuse for stretchy letters.

Even this, however, is different than the Hebrew stretchy letters. Excepting Reish, each of the Hebrew stretchy letters is stretching in the middle of the letter, and has a significant part of the letter at the beginning and the end. F, t, z, and r are stretching beyond themselves, which means that if you stick this in the middle of a word, it winds up making a break in the word.

Does this say "orbit" or "or bit"? #NoContextForYou

There are a few other Roman characters that have flourishes that are made to extend a letter, like e, y, and g.

Pretty flourishes are fun.

Same issue here with the making a visual break. You can really only use this at the end of a word.

These are both the same word, and they take up the same amount of space. But one is legible and the other is not. It's all about where the flourishes are.

But the biggest difference is that there is an accepted convention in Hebrew about these stretching letters, whereas we don't have that so much anymore in the English language. Instead, we have to stretch each letter a little bit, and when that isn't enough, resort to stretching the kerning (spacing between letters and words). I hate kerning. Not only is it more work, I like the aesthetic of the result less.

This is kerning. Kerning is not my friend. The top line has normal kerning, the bottom line has stretched kerning in order to take up more space.

And none of this even gets into the fact that Hebrew has no upper and lower cases (majuscule and miniscule), so it makes for a more solid block of text with fewer white spaces.

Basically, I like Hebrew because it makes my job easy. Well, easier.